Document Type
Article
Publication Date
11-2025
Abstract
For many decades now, worker advocates have bemoaned the inefficacy of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), the statute that protects employees’ right to organize, bargain collectively, and strike. Passed in 1935 after massive worker struggle, the NLRA initially helped spur nearly five million workers to engage in industrial action and almost three million to join a union. Over time, however, the statute’s potency waned. Congressional amendments and Supreme Court interpretation narrowed the law, and employers exploited its weaknesses. As scholars have detailed, the NLRA today lacks sufficient remedies and enforcement mechanisms. It excludes millions of vulnerable workers, including domestic, agricultural, and gig workers. It fails to protect collective action, permitting permanent replacements during strikes and prohibiting secondary boycotts. Its focus on worksite bargaining with individual employers, to the exclusion of sectoral bargaining, is a poor match for the contemporary economy. The statute has “drifted” from its original purpose.
Yet, for all its failings, the NLRA still represents perhaps the most significant incursion into the employment relationship — indeed, into capitalism — of any modern U.S. statute. After all, the statute promises to protect the right of workers to act collectively and to withdraw their labor if their demands are not met. It enables workers to transform decision making within firms so that power is no longer held solely by managers and owners and instead is shared, democratically.
Disciplines
Constitutional Law | Labor and Employment Law | Law
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Kate Andrias,
The Constitutional Fight over the NLRA and the NLRB: A 90 Year Reprise,
8
Mod. Am. Hist.
440
(2025).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/4755